Seeking adventure and needing to pay off student loans, I moved to Taiwan in my early 20s.
I was complaining about my debt when a friend mentioned that teaching English abroad could be a good way out. My job as a child and youth worker in Canada was not covering the bills. I convinced my then-boyfriend to join and we spent the next two and half years teaching kindergarten and elementary students in Taiwan
But after fiscal success, having achieved our goal, we decided to move back to Canada. Returning home in my mid-20s with an inflated ego after a few years of easy money, a comfortable life, and a level of respect as an English teacher proved to be a hindrance to my success in Canada.
We lost a lot of our savings in the time it took us to set up our lives again. We struggled to find jobs in Canada that paid enough to meet living expenses and ended up moving four times between cities. We found ourselves once…